YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK – The winter that Ansel Adams shot one of his most renowned images of Half Dome, Yosemite's iconic granite crest, he nearly gave up photography to become a classical musician.

This year, a play he wrote and set to music from that time, “The Bracebridge Dinner,” celebrates its 80th anniversary in eight performances staged at the park's Ahwahnee Hotel.

Hundreds of families have made attending the play – an elaborate Christmas story about a fictional English squire – a tradition, coming from around the world to eat the accompanying sumptuous, eight-course meal.

For the electricians and park rangers who make up the pageant's Renaissance-era ensemble cast, it's a chance to play a role in Adams' imaginary world.

“He brought the way he viewed the world to all of our eyes,” said Dave Giles, a park manager who plays a tights-wearing extra. “He loved Yosemite, and the Bracebridge was one of the many ways he was able to bring that out.”

Conceived as a ploy to lure travelers to the park in wintertime in the mid-1920s, the play tells of a holiday evening at Bracebridge Hall, home to an unusual English nobleman based loosely on a character created by Washington Irving.

Until 2002, tickets were distributed by lottery, with as many as 60,000 people annually applying for 2,000 spots. Now the event has expanded to allow open ticketing, and audiences have filled the 350 available seats each night, despite the $345 price tag. This season's performances run through Tuesday.

On a recent snowy evening, a dozen hotel chefs fanned out with pears poached in Riesling on trays, in preparation for the onslaught. Guests decked out in evening wear sat in near darkness as singers wearing brocade, furs and sequined pantaloons pranced into the dining room.

Like any production, the dinner has had its share of glitches, cast and crew said. Once, a squirrel chewed through the electrical wires. This month, a prop got lost in the hotel's vast expanses.

But Adams, who wrote the script, arranged the music, oversaw the show's choir and played both jester and host for more than 40 years, always preferred community involvement to professional polish. Generations of park employees and Yosemite locals have grown up playing characters in the play.

“If you lived in Yosemite, you want to be a part of the Bracebridge,” said the photographer's son, Michael Adams, 73.

No one knows that tradition better than the dinner's executive producer, Andrea Fulton, whose father took over the pageant when Adams retired in 1973.

“Ansel was a very detailed person,” Fulton said. “I can remember sitting at a dress rehearsal that lasted until four in the morning while he aimed and re-aimed a light.”